DMM and CPM Strategy Summary:
1. Focus on the two most important days of their life
2. Focus on Equipping and Permission Giving
3. Encourage early Baptism with knock-on effects
4. Pray for and thank God for your Grandchildren
5. Keep systems simple, short, authentic and reproducible
Practical Disciple Making Methods Explained:
Tip 1:
Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day that you were born and the day you find out why!” You can not influence the first day but you can have great input on how their second day pans out.
You can stumble and bumble through it and God will use it somehow. Don’t worry about mucking it up but there are some better principles that you should try and implement as you get more confident in your witnessing and discipling.
The first part of their journey is the “Bridge” to giving them the Gospel (good news about Jesus Christ and what he did for them). Try and use a culturally contextualised bridge that they can relate to. If they are Westerners (post-modern and post-Christian) then they will have a preformed idea of what “church” is and what “church” looks like. In most cases it is not a completely accurate picture, nor maybe even a positive one. Try and plant a suggestion during the bridge crossing that you can draw upon later if needed.
This embryonic seed planted on the bridge may need to sit and germinate for a while before you call upon it to explain the church in more detail. (This seed in and by itself means very little but can play a very big part later on.) Somewhere (anywhere!) along the bridge crossing to the gospel mention the word “church”. It may seem unimportant to you but after a decade of this, I can tell you that it will save you a lot of grief down the track. Use phrases like: “We can do church anywhere”, “We can do church right now”, “I am not asking you to go to any church, we are doing church now”, and “This right now can be a church.” Any phrase that suits the moment that indicates the lowest, simplest embryonic form of church, that church is about its members and not a place or ceremony will do. Later down the track when it comes to the formal “Church Formation” process (Field 4) and they stall at the gate you can say “But we have been doing church right from the beginning, have you forgotten – You are the Church!” For Post Christians this is a much bigger stumbling block than may you realise. For 6 years we could get people over the line and start groups in Aussies but they would balk at forming churches and therefore multiplying further. It was very frustrating. (New Ethnic people in Australia did not have this problem.) So we systematically took all the bumps out of the road and never looked back. This was one of them.
The second part of their journey on that day is the acceptance of the Gospel message itself and the realisation of the value of the pearl of great price. They realise maybe for the first time their real state of being, their sinfulness, their total inadequacy and their utter shame. They realise the absolute power, authority, and purity of God the Father. They realise just what God and Christ had to do to reconcile them back into the presence of God; God’s utter selfless love and total devotion to clear their debt and wipe their slate clean again. It is in essence their “second birth”. A birthday you can influence greatly!
False Conversions or misunderstood conversions slow things right down or stop completely until they are sorted out. The key is to “stick the landing” if ever you have watched gymnastics at the Olympics. This is probably the biggest decision in their life so you have to make sure that they understand what they are getting into and what they are getting in return. Australians particularly hate being “deceived” or tricked. If you have not been upfront with full disclosure they will pull you up on it later. They will hold to the “original contract” or bail completely. One way around this is to fully contextualise the good news in a way that they fully understand it. If you are not skilled at this you can tell them the same things several times in different ways before you get them to tell you/demonstrate to you that they have fully understood the two-edged sword of accepting Christ as both their “Lord” and “Saviour”. An example of this could be that you used to say the 3 circles as an intro/bridge to the gospel, give them one version of the gospel like “Romans Road” and then give them the Lordship circle. Get them to repeat it back to you of what they understood. Then you can give them for example a “Creation to Christ” Gospel and the “Following and Fishing Coin”. Again get them to repeat it. Always mention the simple ceremony of baptism as the first act of obedience and witness. (Flesh it out later). If and only if they get it and are keen then encourage their prayers of repentance and devotion. While there is ANY doubt of both following and fishing treat them as yellow lights and explore it with them.
Tips 2 and 3:
Once they have accepted Christ then move immediately to the topic of baptism. The command is to baptise, not to know the ins and outs and then decide if you want to be baptised or not. It is an act of faith and obedience as much as the spiritual rite and other seven or so reasons. Either He is your Lord or he is not! Even these other main points can be easily covered within an extra 15 min to half an hour or so if you are practiced. Baptism seems to crystallise and set the new baby’s DNA forever. I’m not sure why.
Once they understand that they are to be baptised you then have a primed and ready rocket to launch. It is the first day of the rest of their lives. Most likely they are never going to be quite so grateful for Christ’s gift nor more willing to please him than right then and there. You already have shared a bridge or two with them and maybe your quick testimony in the process. You have most likely given them two different forms of the Gospel which they repeated back to you to demonstrate that they understood it. With these tools, they are now armed to immediately go to the one person that they care most about and immediately share with them what had just happened to them. They could most likely stumble through giving them the bridge and gospel message. They can invite them to attend their baptism. Get them to strike while the iron is hot. Don’t delay. If you have to go with them for support DO NOT SPEAK. Do not give the other person the bridge and gospel or you will have set the wrong DNA right from the get-go. You will never recover that ground again successfully most likely. Their second birthday marks their new life and their new DNA. They would have witnessed and perhaps been baptised within 24 hours. I have seen this knock on to whole households being baptised within 24 hours or at least the majority of the household. In the past, I have waited weeks to do this and it only set everyone up for failure. Mark Twain was right!
As this settles down you can get into the meat of discipleship with MAWL working from a helpless infant church into a fully mature church group that is ready to multiply a copy of their DNA. This is just CPM/DMM bread and butter from here on.
Always watch the group as it forms and develops with your maturity diagnosis card in your back pocket. Don’t show it to them or it will just be a race to comply, a tick-and-flick exercise. If they are missing something that you think they should get, just keep picking scripture for them to SOS themselves in the group. They will get it eventually. Don’t be in a hurry to give them the answers. In fact, my mentor/supervisor never gives me the answer to anything even today. Annoyingly he still replies “What does the Bible say about that?”. If it is good enough for me it is good enough for you. (Remember we use maturity checks and not health checks. You can have a perfectly healthy baby that can not do anything for itself yet and you have to help raise it by feeding it while encouraging learning and skills. You can also have a fully grown adult that is very unhealthy either mentally or physically. They can multiply and do all sorts of things but do you want them to? Our goals should be to raise healthy and mature people and churches!)
Tip 4 Prayer:
If you want to see God moving, if you want to see any type of movement then the level of prayer you are currently doing is not going to cut it. You have to raise the bar and sow with prayer.
In John 17 you will see Jesus praying for his disciples. At the end of that prayer, he actually prays for you and me also starting from verse 20. So too you must pray for and thank the Father in advance for your spiritual grandchildren to come. You can influence your direct children but not so much your grandchildren, thus you must double your efforts of prayer on their behalf. Set up prayer contracts with the people around you. Set up prayer networks. Think of ways to do corporate prayer in a system that is small group-based. Prayer is the foundation of everything.
Tip 5:
Keep your tools short, simple, authentic and reproducible! Keep them relevant to the people groups you work with. Resist adding anything to your system. Test the system first to see if it really needs it. Just because someone else is doing something and it is working great does not mean you have to include it and adopt it. Is it unique? Does it fill a hole that you have and can not fix it with what is already there? Is is simple, short and reproducible? Can you tweak what you are already using to achieve the same thing? Is it simpler and more reproducible than the tools you are currently using? We are hoarders. We are collectors and we like to appear to seem smart and most up to date. But in this world of CPM and DMM, the KISS rule always wins hands down. Keep it simple Sally/Simon! (You thought I was going to say something else then?)
Don’t be afraid to throw your tools under a bus if it will give you a dart on the board with a new people group. Don’t be afraid to modify anything that needs to be contextualised for a people group or a changing culture. Your tools are God’s not yours don’t be possessive or stubborn if there is a better way.
The last thing about this tip is to only use your tools or even your SOS lessons as they are needed! The process is called "Just in Time". Don't overwhelm your disciples. Don't try to fix a problem before they have one! It seems loving and sensible but in reality, it's not. It is most likely that you will over complicate things and they will not value your wisdom as they have no practical application for it yet. When they do, most likely they would have forgotten anything useful anyway. Sometimes you inject the idea of a problem into a system when there was not one in the first place and you have just made your job that much harder. At best you have just created another tick and flick race to say that they have done it. (Trust me, I had to learn this the hard way.)
There are more lessons that we have learned on this journey but they would be the biggest five changes we have made over the years to see multiplication happen. I hope this helps you in some way.
Cheers Macka